c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) To every age, Holy Week must speak anew.

The story remains the same _ the most extensively detailed narrative in the Gospels, indeed the starting point for creating the Gospels. But how we read it changes from age to age and from culture to culture.

As always, some believers want to make their reading of the Passion Narrative normative for all. Events can have only one meaning _ namely, theirs. More mature Christians, however, understand that even the original accounts were assertions of meaning, not dispassionate history, and questions of meaning still beckon.

Here is how those pivotal events in faith history sound to me today:

PALM SUNDAY

In an age when leaders mistake bullying for courage and insist on the prerogatives of office, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem showed real courage and true humility.

His entire earthly ministry led up to making this challenge to Jerusalem. He knew what was coming _ rejection, torture and death _ and he knew that in no other way could he expose the darkness of shallow and self-serving religiosity.

It was not merely ironic, but inevitable, that those who welcomed him would soon call for his crucifixion. The “good news” cut too close.

MAUNDY THURSDAY

Jesus shared a final meal with his friends, both to say farewell and to show them the way forward. It was a meal whose poignancy is rarely captured in Christianity’s formal liturgies.

We fight about language; Jesus knelt at their feet. We fight about who is entitled to preside at the table; Jesus simply passed around bread and wine. We fight about who belongs; Jesus fed all who were present, even his betrayer.

The Last Supper exposes our shallow religiosity. We seem intent on distancing ourselves from the meal’s meaning _ God’s amazing grace, given freely to all, new life, new hope, passed around in love. We would rather fight about the details, as if God’s giving depended on our defining.

GOOD FRIDAY

This day of suffering and death is God’s answer to the questions: How much does God love us? And whom does God love?

God loves us enough to endure torment that he could have avoided, to be humiliated by the powerful, “to stretch out his arms on the hard wood of the cross” as the Daily Office says, and to die a grisly death.

Pastors who won’t leave their offices to make calls, church leaders who won’t take risks or offend the powerful, prelates who ignore their flocks while advancing their careers, church members who whine if worship goes too long, the prideful who think themselves “saved” and all others heathens, religious partisans who would kill rather than allow freedom _ we should all sit quietly before the cross.

And there we should understand that Jesus died for every one of us, even our worst enemies, even those whose beliefs and ways seem loathsome to us.

HOLY SATURDAY

If our age needs anything, it needs humility. Hubris will be our downfall. Rather than strut and spend, we should sit quietly and wait upon the Lord.

We need to stand vigil outside the tomb. Enough of our carefully laid plans for victory through mayhem. Enough of our determination to be right. Enough of our solemn assemblies. Enough of our conspiracies to control property. Enough of living off endowments and thinking Sunday is all that matters to God.

If we have a story worth telling, it won’t be a story of our greatness, it will be a story of a week when all _ even the powerful and righteous _ were driven to silence.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

KRE/PH END EHRICH

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